5 Steps to Accurately Price Your Consulting Rates

Determining consulting services rates has been one of the challenges that many professionals face. This is due to inexperience as well as lack of proper guidance in accurately determining consultation rates.

Whether offering an hourly rate or a flat rate services, it is your responsibility to work ascertain your services before making the final step towards your services.

In addition, first-time customers may feel nervous about paying a huge project fee, preferring, as an alternative, to pay by hour. Determining an hourly rate for your consultancy services may provide a fair as well as consistent rate to most your clients. The question is how do you set your consulting charges?

Before deciding on how much you should charge a client, you need the following things: a paper, pen, and a calculator. After getting the following above prerequisite materials, follow the below instructions.

Step one: Based on Forbes research on how to set your hourly consulting services, you start by setting your hourly rate. Sum up your annual salary before dividing by 2,080, the annual number of hours you worked. Add all the cost expenses that usually range from 35 to 40% of the annual salary. Add the base salary and the cost benefits before dividing by 2.080. Next is to double the figure and this gives you your hourly rate. The additional factor can sometimes cause a deviation in the final rate. These factors depend on many circumstances that affect the business both external and internal.

Step two: The second factor to consider when settling on consulting rates is the years of experience. For instance, a former IT director who carries out consulting services may charge a higher fixed or hourly rate than a new IT consultant performing similar task. Higher research pays stages for positions in your career.

Step three: you must also factor in the level and areas of expertise. Set your rates in a direct proportion to how much specific as well as valuable your proficiency is to customers. For instance, a consultant with a recognizable name, worked with a marquee client or written a book has a better position to demand a higher rate compared to its competitor who has never done so. Your level of expertise distinguishes your services from the competitors and makes have a more competitive advantage to prospective clients.

Step four: Develop a nice "cushion" for your customers. Ensure you give your clients better attitude enabling them to pay higher on the following services. These kinds of arrangement may also benefit the first-time customers who may be anxious about paying higher amount of money for your work. For example, Digital marketing consultants should take into consideration any additional services in the final charge.

Step five: Give additional consulting services to your clients. You must calculate the extra services offered when determining your final price for consulting services. Finally ensures all services offered by your subordinate staff are calculated in the final fee charged.
The five steps above should will help you as a consultant make wiser decision on how much to charge for your consultancy services.

Tips for Leveraging SlideShare for Lead Generation

Whether on social media or any other avenue, marketing campaigns require visual elements if you want to generate more leads. SlideShare allows you to make use of visual elements and maximize your leads. Here are some tips to help you make the best use of SlideShare.

Make use of well written SlideShare content which targets the  

right audience

You must present yourself as an expert in your industry or in the topic in which you are sharing with the targeted audience. Look for great topics which are fresh and can attract a large number of new readers. Even though most of your SlideShare content should be based on your core topic, you should also write content that targets a different audience but is fresh and exciting at the time.

Be very keen when creating the title slide

This acts as your headline and is the one that is going to catch the user’s attention. The very first slide should be readable and perfectly designed. If you present to your audience a topic that is catchy, you will pull in more readers to click on the content. Bear in mind that presentation is important and your title slide plays a very important role in this.

Ensure all presentations are optimized for search engines

You can do this by including a list of keywords on your titles, description and tags when creating the presentations. Whether your SlideShare presentation is about technology or health, descriptions and titles contribute heavily to search engine optimization (SEO) and establishing keyword relevancy, so take your time when writing them.

Proper keyword use will help make your presentations more exposed in the search engines. You will also increase your visibility on SlideShare search results. You can also create inbound links by allowing others to embed your presentation. Note that SlideShare presentations can be embedded easily into other websites.

Integrate your SlideShare presentations across multiple channels

This way, you will not be forcing users to change to a specific platform in order to consume your content. This will enhance your visual marketing campaign. You can embed the presentations on blogs and other landing pages so that they can be viewed in multiple platforms. For instance, you can decide to embed your presentations across your company blog. This will help you to attract a greater following.

Plan an effective promotion strategy for publishing your presentations

You should do this even before you start uploading images on SlideShare. Remember that the main goal is to get as many shares as you can on all your presentations. This will ensure that your presentations appear on the main page of SlideShare. Always ensure that any presentation is well marketed by your team before it is published. You need to promote this presentation even after it is published.

Devise a plan that will help you increase the number of shares and likes you receive on social media. This will ensure that once you post your presentation, you will receive a high level of response and drive more users to view your presentations. Without proper planning your campaign will not reach it's fullest marketing potential.

How Google+ Will Influence Your SEO & Web Presence Optimization Strategy

Google's "Search Plus Your World" was unveiled to help make search results more personalized and relevant to users. Search Plus Your World centers on Google+, Google's emerging social media platform. And it's all having a profound influence on SEO and web presence optimization.

It sort of works like this... 

When a Google+ user adds a person or business to their circles, that person or business has some degree of influence over the user's search results.

For example, lets say I add the Trek bikes page to my circles. Trek often makes Google+ posts about their new bike models. One of their most recent posts was about their new "Trek Concept 7" (a popular triathlon bike.)

So when I go to Google and search for the "Trek Concept 7," Google will display their recent Google+ post about this particular bike. Because I have Trek in my circles, and because my search was very keyword relevant to their recent Google+ post, I am shown these unique, socially-influenced results.

This a serious game changer for business and brands with an online presence. In essence, the more people that have a certain brand or business in their circles, the more influence that brand or business will have over their search results. It's evolving the SEO and search marketing playing field like never before.

Leverage Google+ and Expand Your Web Presence

So how do you start leveraging Google+ to expand your web presence and increase your SEO potential?
Below I share with you a few tips to help you get started.

• Set-up your Google+ business page and populate the page as thoroughly as you can. This includes the visual elements (main banner and profile image) that reflect your online brand.
• Frequently post (shoot for daily post) relevant content that educates, informs, and/or inspires your followers.
• Join relevant Google+ communities and be active in those communities by sharing good content.
• Reach out and encircle influencers (authoritative people who are relevant to your brand) as well as other related business and brands.
• Promote your Google+ presence on your website and other social media platforms

By becoming an early adopter on Google+, your SEO and web presence optimization efforts will only be magnified in the future. Jump on-board now and start building an authoritative presence that will soon shape the search results of your Google+ followers.

5 Essential Practices for Mobile SEO

It is evident that mobile use continues to expand and increases in value. Each year, there is an article that explains to organizations different ways of getting the best from mobile platforms. Besides, every year, such an article becomes exceedingly essential. Below are the five essential mobile SEO practices.

1. Responsive web design – This forms an important part in the world of mobile website optimization. Responsive web design creates a fantastic user experience. It helps to simplify the process of accessing and reading a website.

Therefore, you do not need to scroll down too far before finding the relevant text. With a SEO-friendly website design in place, Google finds it easy to crawl your content. If creating a responsive web design becomes hard because it cannot fit well with your organization, you may come up with a different mobile website or even use a separate gadget specific HTML.

2. Social media integration - It is essential to have social buttons on the mobile phone. The significance of having such buttons on the phone is that mobile phone users often use these devices to entertain themselves. When using their phones, most people stick with their mobile phones because it is easy to use most social apps. Therefore, helping your friends to tweet and share your info is easy.

3. Short-tail keywords – think for a while of when you want to search content on your cell phone, for instance. You will, most likely, select the autosuggestion because you will find it strenuous to type those tiny letter keys. As an organization, you need to presume that your users do the same thing hence you should keep away from those long tail keywords that most people will find it hard to type in their phones.

4. Local search – Like other types of print advertising, yellow pages continue to take a back seat in the Internet and the main reason is the advancement in the use of local search. Local search is becoming popular because it is offers faster, easier, and better results for businesses and users. Local SEO entails optimizing the local map listings to help people locate your company and find step-wise directions from the company location.

It also entails organic SEO and local directory submissions that help your organization to rank well in search engine results. Therefore, you should optimize your mobile content such that users can search about your company locally. You should use mobile local search because it is less expensive, it is targeted, and easy for users to search your business online than flipping through the yellow pages.

5. Mobile apps - In 2013 and beyond, mobile platform is going to make use of apps. Many users continue to use apps like Shazam and UrbanSpoon to help them access information quickly through a medium designed specifically for cell phones. This means if you want more visibility, you should consider creating the app on your website. If you do this, you simply target the many users of these apps. To include an app on your website, you can find an mobile SEO company that does that.